Gerard says Desert kill was written between the hours of midnight and four a.m. -- Hawthorne's hours of the haunted mind -- the hours when night mares happen. The suspense gets under your skin and doesn't let go till the gut-wrenching climax.
Philip Gerard is the author of 13 books, including The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina. Gerard was the author of Our State's Civil War series. He currently teaches in the department of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.